Just under half of purchases were financed by mortgage loans

The latest set of data regarding the residential property market to come from Spain’s notaries was published on Tuesday, reporting a sharp year-on-year decrease of 18.9 per cent in sales figures and a corresponding fall of 16.2 per cent in mortgage activity in June 2019 across the country as a whole.

These latest data would appear to confirm the impression given by the figures of previous months, namely that the level of activity in the real estate market of Spain is perhaps stabilizing after a long period of significant growth. There have been year-on-year decreases in sales figures in three of the last four months, the only exception being a minimal rise of 0.9 per cent in April. The most recent data are still provisional, but when confirmed they are likely to show that the market is finally reaching a level of stability in nationwide terms, having plummeted from 100,000 sales a month in 2007 to under 30,000 in 2013.

During the sixth month of the year, according to the notaries’ provisional figures, the number of sales and purchases finalized reached 46,527and the average price paid for units of housing rose by 1 per cent in comparison with June 2018 to 1,435 euros per square metre. However, as ever it should be remembered this is a hard figure to analyse: variations in average price are not necessarily due to any nationwide trend, as they could be caused by more properties being sold in different regions of the country where prices are higher or lower, distorting the national average.

Meanwhile, the number of mortgages constituted on housing purchases during June was 16.2 per cent lower than last year at 22,261, with an average loan capital of 151,658 euros, 5.4 per cent higher than in the same month last year. 47.8 per cent of all purchases in the month were financed by mortgage loans, a proportion which in May rose above 50 per cent since 2010, and in these cases the mortgages accounted for an average of 74.7 per cent of the sale price.